


The Color of Shadow

by ellen_fremedon



Category: Hainish Cycle - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: First Contact, Gen, Original Annaresti character, Original anarcho-syndicalist character, Original lesbian character, shifgrethor, why yes those three are all the same OC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 12:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/pseuds/ellen_fremedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two first investigators come to Gethen. And bring their baggage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Color of Shadow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pitseleh](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pitseleh/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! Thank you for giving me a chance to write in this fandom!

Like any proper Annaresti, Kushud came empty-handed to the planet of Winter. Ong Tot Oppong, the Chiffewaran, was scandalized by her bare quarters—"But we'll be in orbit for at least a year, darling! Don't you want something more homelike?"

To Kushud, who had gone from creche to a succession of dormitories to the student sharehouses on Hain and Ve, the Chiffewaran-built ship was awash in unjustifiable luxuries, of which her lofty private room was the most oppressive. Spareness rendered it habitable, barely, spareness and her own stern disapproval of the Iotic lamps, the swath of deep carpet. To Oppong, she merely shrugged. "Doesn't need to be like home. Is home, for now."

Her bravado did not help her to sleep, her first night shipboard: she tossed, trapped by the vast soft bed and groping vainly for the edge of the mattress with hands and feet. Oppong tapped at her door while she was still making the bed, trying to smooth the balloon of a coverlet back into place. "Good morning. I'm so glad I caught you before we took stations for NAFAL." She waved a hand towards Kushud's room console, though not close enough to wake it. "I thought I could help you set up a projection window in here," Oppong said, as though Kushud were a child or an uneducated person and didn't know how.

"Is a kind offer," Kushud said, and meant to say "but I know how."

But Oppong smiled with relief. "I just want us to be good ship-sibs. Especially since I know we got off to a shaky start." And Kushud did not say the rest.

The shaky start had come before launch, when Oppong had sat down next to her at Ollul Port, after a long and too-rich dinner, and said "Ugh. At least I'm not tempted to break my rule about shipboard romance."

Kushud, sleepy with food and uncertain whether it would all agree with her, had just looked puzzled. "The rule, silly, is _don't bother,_ " Oppong had said, flicking her eyes in the direction of their shipmates: Otie Nim and Tinibossol, their fellow Investigators, and Sjorey and Bright, the partnered pilot and engineer who would stay with the ship. "The only passable one's married, and just look at the others. Or don't. Though they're both sweethearts, of course." And then at Kushud's look, though it was still only of puzzlement, she had hastily said "Oh, no—it's just that Tinibossol is old enough to be my grandfather! I'm sure Otie is very handsome, if that's your type. Oh!" She covered her mouth suddenly, as though she had just given offence.

“No," Kushud said. "Not mine."

"Truly?" Oppong laughed. "And you with that long braid!" Most Chiffewarans, like Oppong, were smoothly bald. Most Annaresti, like Kushud, were the descendents of Urrasti emigrants from Nim's nation of A-Io. Iotic women shaved their heads and bodies. Annaresti, of either sex, did not. "But you still don't like hairy men?"

Kushud realized Oppong had been talking about copulation. "Don't like men," she said. "Not that way."

"Oh." Oppong flushed, all the way up her scalp. Kushud, who had not touched the wine, wondered how much she had had to drink. "I do. I mean, I don't like women that way. I just don't. In case you were wondering."

Kushud had not been. Kushud did not even like most women that way, and had had no intention of asking Oppong to copulate. But Oppong seemed determined to keep it that way; as soon as they moved aboard, she began treating Kushud as a sister. She was the only person Oppong called ship-sib, though they were all shipmates together.

Kushud, lonely already for friends and sib-students left behind on Ve, was glad of the intimacy. The projection of the red Mzuri desert that Oppong helped her to choose, garish though it was, comforted her with its reminder of fellowship. Kushud felt obscurely guilty when she replaced it, a few months into their reconnaisance orbit, with a landscape from the surface of Winter, a field of frost-bowed ripe grain; but Oppong, though the image made her shiver dramatically, smiled at her and said, "You see? So spacious, I'd hardly know I was on a ship."

 

Kushud's first days on-planet were a haze of clumsiness: her feet stumbled in the snowshoes she had only worn on the ship's plush carpets; her fingers fumbled in their mittens, numb and so stiff that that when they came indoors, into the home of their first hosts on Winter, she had to beg Oppong to unfasten her coat; and her ears, trained to the smooth, sexless voices on the radio, strained to make sense of the Kermish fisherfolk's terse dialect and weathered croaks.

It was standard Investigatory advice: you will never pass as native the first place you visit, so begin your visit as an outsider. Kushud and Oppong had learned the accents of Ehrenrang, so they came ashore by the coast of Kerm Land, hoping to seem citifed to the Kermish, rustic when they reached the capitol, and always from just far enough away to excuse any incongruity of speech or custom.

They guested for three nights at Morreng Sorg Hearth, having learned from radio plays that this was the customary span, then for three nights a day's journey down the road at Morreng Dosthenner; then at the crossroads of Ebrane Morreng, where Kushud abruptly began to think in Karhidish.

She was sitting at the kitchen worktable with Arguyry Hesh Ebrane em Morreng when it happened, helping to peel breadapples with a bone-handled paring knife, its blade worn to concavity. Oppong sat at the table's other end, nearest the cookstove, and soothed Arguyry's baby, who was fussy. "Oh, Kushud!" Oppong called, down the long table. "You should ask Arguyry how to make that dish we had last night, with the sube-eggs on top!"

Arguyry drew in a breath, back suddenly stiff, even though cooks at the other Hearths had volunteered recipes unasked. "So simple," said Arguyry, or Kushud thought she did. "Too simple to need teaching. You play at me."

"Arguyry," Kushud said, rather timorously, "I really do want to know. Would you tell me? Or show me?"

Arguyry relented and recited the recipe, but did so with many glances back to Oppong, who was wholly absorbed in the baby. Kushud peeled breadapple and concentrated on committing all the new words to memory: _pelmen,_ to scrape; _borreden,_ to grate; _guymen_ , to roast; _torom,_ one-thirteenth, _tottorm,_ three-thirteenths _; orer,_ floury, a word she had also heard applied to snow.

"Your friend there," Arguyry said after a long interval of breadapple, just loud enough that Oppong could have overheard if she were listening, "when hopes for?" And before Kushud could try on other shades of meaning— _await, anticipate, expect—_ the question neatly rearranged itself in her head: "When is your friend due?"

"You'd have to ask Ongrabe," she said, using the name Oppong had taken, an attested Karhidish name; her own parsed as the unattested _od-pong,_ which, if a word, would have meant something like 'un-stretch' or possibly 'inelastic' _. Kushud_ was unattested, but unparseable and phonologically plausible, so she had kept it.

Arguyry smiled at Kushud, relaxing back onto the bench. "Mm. As well not to tread on another's shadow. _Nusuth_ , who are we, to care about shadows all the way out here? Though I never found mine to be shortened by teaching what I know." And she taught Kushud three more recipes.

"They deem you pregnant," Kushud told Oppong the next, on the road from the Morreng Hearths into the interior. They spoke Karhidish with each other.

" _Deem_ ," repeated Oppong. "I don't know how you're picking up so much more dialect than I am. They don't use it in front of me, and no one will correct my speech."

"We came in speaking like city folk," Kushud ventured. "A _prestige_ variant." She used the Hainish word, _yenevavan._ "Your accent sounds more correct to them than theirs."

"So must yours have," Oppong said, "and yet."

They trudged in silence for a bit; the sun had risen over the low smear of cloud, and their eyes were dazzled.

"Is it because they think me to be pregnant?" Oppong said. "Is that why they're more formal with me?"

"Might be," Kushud allowed. Remembering even three and four days ago now required an effort of translation, and she had no faith in her earlier interpretations; but there had been other differences in their treatment, which now seemed explicable. "They keep sitting you closer to the fire, and passing the orsh to you first."

"And thrusting babies at me. But there must have been other pregnant people in those households."

"No other pregnant guests."

"I suppose."

"If Tinibossol is right, maybe everyone you thought to be female was pregnant."

 _"O god,_ " Oppong murmured in Hainish. "You think it's the adults, too?" The Investigators had first categorized Tinibossol's observation—that neither major language of Winter expressed human gender outside the context of what appeared, from the radio dramas, to be an unusally overt estrus cycle—as a purely linguistic phenomenon. That theory had not long survived planetfall. Young children went naked indoors, and nearly all had ambiguous genitals. Oppong had suggested that primary sex characteristics must only develop at puberty, and secondary sex characteristics—breasts, vocal shifts—sometimes not at all; a response, perhaps, to the paucity of fats and protein in the diet.

"Might be."

 _"O god,"_ Oppong repeated. "What a terrible place."

"I like it," Kushud said. Oppong beat her mittened hands against her thighs, loud in the still air, and walked on.

 

Kushud did like Winter. She had dreaded the planetfall, her first as an Investigator. She had lived among archists and propertarians—her Ekumenical studies had brought her first to Urras, then to Hain and Ve, and finally to Ollul and the last training for this mission—but the Winter that she had learned from its radio spillover was a storybook world of kings—kings!—and merchants and hereditary lords; and, on the other side of the world, of laws and courts and the lumbering bureaucratic apparatus of a State.

But from the surface, Winter— _Gethen_ —was more home-like than any place she had lived since Annares. The people were hospitable, sharing freely what they had. They lived communally, sleeping in a warren of private rooms but sharing meals, work, and gossip at the warm center of the Hearth, and sharing the care of their children in vibrant creches. Their homes, though ancient by Annaresti standards, were not cluttered—they kept few material things, all useful, all well-made and well-cared for. They could not live lightly on their unforgiving land, but they lived mindfully, taking what they needed for survival, but reaching seldom for opulence or even comfort. Even the cuisine was congenial, based on grain and a little fish and a few long-keeping sweet or starchy fruits. Kushud went to bed each night and woke each morning ravenous, but in between she slept soundly, and she was learning the swift, shuffling gait of the snowshoes; she could keep pace now with Oppong, who had snowshoed on Orint, and the exercise warmed her quickly, so that she often opened her coat to let in the cold air.

After Ebrane Morreng, the road passed through a forest of the dwarf trees their hosts had called _thore_ , twisted and scrubby as the holum of Annares. The forest covered the slope between the coastal plain and the high plateau, a long and slow ascent, with no settlements until the other side. They slept in the shelter they had been told they would find, no more than a shack, but thickly bermed with turves. Their body heat warmed it quickly.

Kushud had feared Oppong would feel the need to make a joke of the fact that they were not going to copulate, as though that were new information, or as though either of them even wanted to. But she was cold and exhausted and didn't say anything but "We should share both bedrolls." Kushud was glad of her presence, as much as of her warmth; she snuggled gratefully into Oppong's back.

In the morning, Oppong seemed embarassed. She was distant, and snapped at Kushud for rolling up Oppong's bedroll as well as her own, and somehow doing it wrong.

Still early, they left the forest but continued climbing, and by midday the very tops of the trees were hidden under the horizon; they were on a high and treeless plain. New snow had fallen, and no vehicles had been by to disturb it. There were no fences; there were no mileposts. There was nothing in that vast plain to distinguish road from field, or land from sky: the smooth, unbroken overcast diffused the sun's light equally in all directions. They stood at the center of a featureless white globe.

Oppong went ahead, but Kushud could not see or judge how far—there was no foreground and no background, only a single flat figure, seeming one moment tiny and near, the next moment monstrously large and immensely distant. There was no perspective.

The figure turned. "Well?" She grew larger, or nearer. "What's wrong, Kushud?"

"It's all white," she said. "I can't see which way is forward."

"Don't you still have your compass? I've got mine; we're going the right way. Oh." She suddenly loomed up, right in Kushud's face. "Oh, ship-sib. You've never been anywhere with snow like this, have you? Listen, you'll get used to it, I promise."

"To not seeing? To not having anything to see?"

"Here, take hold of my sleeve. And watch your shadow."

"I'm not casting one."

"Yes you are. It's just not very sharp. And the snow is casting shadows, too—lots of them, every little flake is casting a shadow on its neighbors. Come on."

She flailed after Oppong, holding hard to her sleeve, shading her eyes with her other hand, looking for the outline of a shadow. She didn't find it. Instead, she saw its color, a sudden depth of blue where before there had been only a blinding white; and when she looked out over the landscape, blues and yellows suddenly glinted up from all sides, a tumbled plain of rises and rills, drifts and slopes, a thick impasto not only of hue but of shape. She let go Oppong's sleeve and stared.

"Got it?" said Oppong. "Good for you. I told you you'd get used to it." She huffed, her breath hanging in wreaths around her face. "I thought I was used to it. And to cold. But Orint was nothing like this."

 

They made good time after that, but rumor preceded them to Stok, the local seat of government. They were met at the gate to the walled enclosure of the Hearth by a solemn adolescent and led through a courtyard, blanketed heavily in soft new snow, to a great gray tower scarred with the marks of ancient weaponry. As they approached the entrance, the door of one of the connected outbuildings opened in a burst of steam to admit four naked adults, who dove into the snow, and rolled and shook, and ran back inside. They were all as completely physically androgynous as the children at Morreng.

The Lord of the Domain greeted them in a cold upstairs study, and, after a long look at their faces, asked their names. "I am Ongrabe," said Oppong, "and this is Kushud." They had not adopted or invented surnames, or clan or hearth names; there was too much risk that a made-up name would be detected, and a real name carry with it expectations or obligations they could not predict. They gave their given names, and none of their hosts had yet asked for more.

Stokven turned to a tall, elderly person at his side, and said "I had not heard of any persons being outlawed from Estre this winter, Kyorth."

They both looked at Oppong. "Nor have I," she said.

"Nor from Beberren," said Kyorth, "nor yet of any edicts of banishment from the king in Ehrenrang."

"No," said Oppong.

"And yet," said Stokven, "there are only so many roads that lead to the coast and the Morreng hearths."

"Indeed," said Oppong, and shot a worried look to Kushud.

"We are not outlaws," Kushud said firmly.

She had meant it as reassurance, but Stokven's eyes narrowed. "You are the guests of this Domain. That is all I need to know of your affairs." Stokven stood, and they followed the gesture. "I leave you in the care of my shoulder. You have the hospitality of this Domain."

Kushud sifted the sentences for mishearings or misparsings, but Kyorth bowed slightly and said "I am the Lord's Shoulder, Sibbery Kyorth," and she mentally capitalized _Shoulder_ and began sifting her mind for translations instead: _aide, steward, major-domo._

"We don't sup for another hour," Kyorth said, leading them down a set of stone stairs and into sudden warmth. "But there's steam going in the bathhouse, if you'd like to have a sweat." The Shoulder nodded towards a carven door at the end of the hall.

Kushud yearned toward it with equal parts cold and nostalgia. But there were voices coming from the bath; until they knew the range of physiological variation on this planet, on how variants were perceived, public nudity was too dangerous. "No, thank you."

Kyorth was waiting for Oppong's response. "Myself, I always found it was the only way to get warm, when I was pregnant."

"And if I were pregnant, I would take your advice," said Oppong.

Kyorth's eyes flashed with a sudden and to Kushud inexplicable anger. "A person may discard a name and keep a shadow, but to whom shall we say the shadow belongs, ehm? I'll show you the room where you'll sleep."

Perhaps their other hosts had been cosseting the expectant mother—at supper, Oppong was not given the warmest seat or the richest food. But Kyorth was actively cold to her, and dissmissive of Kushud, and the folk of Stok took their cues from the Shoulder; it was an uncomfortable meal.

After they met the same treatment at breakfast, Oppong pulled Kushud aside by the fire. "Will you ask Kyorth what I did to offend him?"

"I? Why not ask him yourself?"

"And make it worse somehow? Not likely." She took Kushud's hand in both of hers. "Please, _ship-sib_ ," she said in Hainish, and then in Karhidish, "my little sib. For me?" The gesture, and the expression she turned on Kushud, were openly flirtatious—sufficiently so to register to Kushud, who often missed flirtation entirely—and she realized that Oppong was asking her because she did not know how to apologize to a person in a position of power without flirting.

"I'll ask," said Kushud. She wondered if Oppong knew that the Pravic words for sibling were the common forms of address between friends on Annares, and that most of the women she had ever copulated with had called her _sister._

Kushud found Kyorth in a workroom, where a powered loom was quietly excreting cloth. "Mr. Kyorth."

"Oh, it's you. Is there a problem?"

"One that may be mended, I hope. May I ask what my friend has done to offend you?"

Kyorth stared at her in some surprise. "Now that is beyond belief. Ongrabe sent you, is that it?"

"Yes."

"Well. Never let it be said I'm too proud to explain myself. You can tell your bald friend that I refuse to play at shifgrethor in my own house with some nobody off the high road. And as for you, youngster—let me give you some advice." The last words fell coldly, and Kushud began to have an idea of where Oppong had gone wrong. "You are past old enough to carry your own shadow. I suggest," Kyorth said, "that you start now."

They tried to leave Stok after that night, but Kyorth would not have it, insisting that they stay another day so as give the Hearth time to assemble a suitable parting gift. They spent most of that day and night in their room with the door bolted. Kushud was afraid—here was archism in its most primal form, a _Lord,_ and that lord's retainers; here was a power that, baseless and vain, could brook no insult and no breach of custom. She could not rid her mind of the images of Iotic prisons from long-ago history lessons.

Oppong was on her ansible to Tinibossol in Orgoreyn, feverishly comparing notes on androgyny. "And how can you not care!" Tinibossol's message crawled across the screen. "This is like nothing else in the Hainish Diaspora, this is so much more important than whether I insulted some tin-pot lord's steward."

"It might not be to us, if that tin-pot lord takes against us," Kushud said.

"I've been doing this a lot longer than you, little sib; I think I know what I'm about, and I think I know what matters."

"To you," Kushud said. "We're here to learn what matters to them. And, is not copulation!" Her Karhidish came out Pravic-accented; always, before, she had erred in the direction of Hainish. _"It_ is not. These people don't care that they are androgynous. They do care about this taboo on advice-giving. Have you heard this word before, this _shifgrethor?_ "

Oppong waved away her concern. "Have you heard the word _kemmer?_ Because Tinibossol has found some things out. Read this."

In the morning Kyorth presented them, not only with a bag of food, as all their hosts had provided, but with a small purse of coin. Kushud was reasonably certain they were meant to take this as an insult; and with her Annaresti sensibilities, she found this distressingly easy to do. As a parting shot, Kyorth told them, "I believe the road-packer to Beberren will overtake you around the tenth hour. There is nothing preventing you from flagging it down."

 

They hitched a ride with the driver of the road-packer, a vehicle with a heavy roller which packed the new snow solid for the use of powered sledges. It went no faster than walking speed, but it could roll along for longer than they could walk, and it was well after dark when the driver stopped at Gorinhereng village, where there was an inn.

The village was only the first of many, or Kushud would have wanted to stop longer; but this portion of the plain was more thickly populated than the desolate coast, dotted with small towns and hamlets. Gorinhereng village consisted of Gorinhereng Hearth on one side of the road; on the other, the inn above a cook-shop which functioned as its refectory; a goods depot with a window full of household objects, still lit up at night; a few dark windows that might have been workshops or offices or classrooms; and, set back on short alleys from the main street, a few large houses and clusters of small ones—village hearths, the driver had said, rather dismissively—and two residences which, the driver claimed, were not really proper islands like in the city, but only boarding-houses. Still, the driver told them, the inn was good; and they found it clean and warm.

They had brought some small valuables, sewn into their pockets—carbon gems, which were portable and costly, but not easy to turn into currency. Kyorth's insult, if it was that, had done them a good turn; when they paid for their beds and counted what was left, they had enough to pay for two more nights' village lodgings— not coincidentally, the time it took them, hitch-hiking and on foot, to reach Beberren, the nearest small city.

In Gorinhereng, and the next two villages, Oppong asked after a fictional friend. "A jeweler—planning to settle down around here, the last I heard. Name of Sule." No one had heard of Sule the jeweler, but by the time they reached Beberren, they had heard the names, addresses, and distinguishing features of all the jewelers actually working in the city. Oppong insisted on handling the actual commerce—"No offense, darling, but have you actually haggled before? I didn't think so—" and at the end of it, they had turned a ruby into a sum sufficient to rent two tiny rooms in what the road-packer driver had called an island—a shared house with its own communal kitchen, laundry, and workrooms, like an urban Hearth.

The rooms were rented by the half-month. They had made their landing just after the turn of the year; it was now Odyrny Thern, the twenty-fourth day of the first month. The manager of the island had one vacant room, and was willing to let them share it for two days until another came open at Getheny Thanern, the first of the next month. They took lodgings at least through Tormbenbod, the half-month day, to explore the city.

And to observe the island, as if it were another hearth where they were guesting. Most of Mabe Island's occupants seemed about Kushud's age—they were working people from the countryside, half-time students, artists struggling without audience (a plight she understood) or patronage (which she did not). To them, Kushud's story, that she was newly come to Beberren and hadn't decided whether she wanted to stay, explained everything that needed explaining.

Oppong, a decade older and not seeming much like a tourist, needed more explanation. She gave none, but she did gain a certain measure of respect, enough to grant immunity from questions for a while, their first night in the island, when she sat down to supper and announced, "Before anyone asks when it's due, I'm not pregnant."

"Then may I ask instead how you lost your hair so young?" asked Kushud's neighbor to the left, a musician called Tove.

On her right, Hesth, a student at the engineering school, said "Or are you not bald, either?" This collapsed the table in scandalized hilarity. Kushud surmised, writing up her day's notes, that Oppong had been bracingly rude; Tove, daringly rude; and Hesth, outrageously rude.

"You don't need to over-analyze everything," Oppong said, when she shared this insight. "You've got the language down well enough to just speak it; _god knows_ there'll be time enough for debriefings when we're all back on Ollul."

Oppong was fretting about kemmerhouses: the impossibility of getting into one, the necessity of getting into one.

"Why can't you just _elicit a first-person account_?" Kushud said, reverting to Hainish. She was sleepy, and Oppong was tapping out another argument with Tinibossol on the ansible. "Or find an existing one; Tove told me there is a library here with public reading and listening rooms."

"Then you go, darling. Go and see what you find."

 

Kushud did go to the library; she didn't find a description of a kemmerhouse visit, nor could she make any sense of the cataloging system, but she did find a long narrative account of an ancient feud between the Domains of Stok and Estre and listened to the whole thing, enthralled. Walking home to Mabe Island, she fell in with Tove, and mentioned it; Tove lit up in a smile. "You'd never heard it? How lucky for you, to come to it without preconceptions. The prose narrative is lovely, but my favorite version is the play—I drummed for a troupe that performed it last year; such language!"

Kushud went out the next day with Tove to hear a traditional chant—religious, she thought, though Tove's explanation clarified nothing. Tove led her on a long walk back through the city, pointing out favorite eating-places, the best shops for boots and music-tapes and haircuts (if she ever wanted to cut her hair), parks packed to street level—two meters deep—in snow, but with the tops of painted spires rising up like gardens, a luxury that Kushud thought she did not so much mind.

Tove spent the evening playing sound-tapes for her on the common room music system—chants like the one they had heard, and then chants with drumming, and then other musics from the same base, the same beats rising and weaving through all of them, wonderful music. It was quite late when Oppong appeared on the stairs and said "Kushud, your things are still in my room. You were supposed to be moving into Fourteen today, remember?"

Kushud's things had expanded to include one change of shirt, two of body-linen, three of socks, and her own set of bath articles. Aside from those, she had her bedroll, a small briefcase containing her ansible and a paper notebook and pen, and a toothbrush, comb, compass, torch, and knife. She had left them all rolled up together around the ansible case. She followed Oppong back to Room Nine, picked up the bundle, and marched it around the corner into her new room. Oppong handed her the key, and followed her inside.

"We need to talk about our next plans. After the halfmonth is up."

"Time yet to decide," Kushud said. "Beberren is a good base, for a while at least."

"It seems to me like some inquiries are going to be a lot easier in the rural areas," said Oppong. "Pregnant people get a lot of latitude; if we use a few different names, go out to some of the more distant hearths, we could probably get fairly nosy without attracting too much attention." She smiled. "Or I could, and you could be polite on my behalf—you're very good at that."

Kushud tried to say "Thank you." It didn't come out. Instead she shook out her bundle and spread her own blanket over the island's linens and coverlet. "I'm going to sleep now," she said, and Oppong left.

The next morning Tove wasn't at breakfast. Kushud lingered over porridge and breadapple, planning her day in her head, realizing she had planned large parts of it around Tove. She and Hesth were alone at the table, sipping orsh gone cold, when Tove clattered down the stairs. "Kushud. Good morning."

Hesth looked between them and sidled out the door.

"Tove," Kushud said, and didn't know what to say next. Tove looked excited—bright-eyed, with high color in the cheeks.

"Kushud. I'm—I'm on my way now."

"On your way?"

"To the kemmerhouse," Tove said, apologetically. "Would you like to go with me? Or stay here with me? Because I would like that."

"I can't," she said. "I'm sorry."

"I know what you are. It's all right!" Tove protested, as she felt herself shrink. "I thought the other day you were just a couple of days ahead of me, but you're not, are you? You're a halfdead."

Her discovery that there must be non-androgynes on Gethen, and that this was a shameful or a tawdry thing, was drowned by her relief that she had not been found out; and only in the wake of both did she realize that Tove was asking her to copulate.

"I can't," she repeated. "It's not that I don't like you." She did like Tove, yesterday's Tove, and she _wanted_ to like this new glowing, vibrant Tove with the brilliant eyes. But this Tove smelled suddenly sharp and wrong; and she knew without asking that this Tove was male. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Tove said. "Can I ask you again next month?"

She waited long enough to answer that an answer was superfluous. "Then I won't," Tove said. "If you change your mind, you can ask me." He wrapped his coat around his shoulders, unfastened, the sleeves flapping free, and went out the door.

Kushud watched him go. She wondered what Oppong would say, if she knew Kushud had just turned down an invitation to a kemmerhouse, with a native guide no less.

"There you are," said Oppong, appearing on the stair landing. "Have you seen Tove this morning?"

"Just now, on the way out."

"Oh, good." She stopped on the third stair, looking down at Kushud. "Look, I'm sorry I was out of sorts last night, but I worry about you—I remember what it was like to be your age, and far from home."

"I am home," Kushud said. "For now."

"Of course, of course. I just want to make sure you've thought about what impression you're giving. You don't want to mislead Tove. You know how badly that could go."

"I know."

"Not just for you, and for Tove, but for everyone who's counting on you."

"I know."

"I think it would be better to put some more distance between you, don't you?"

"More distance?" Kushud said. "I think we have enough." She aimed for lightness; it came out flat, and Oppong looked at her with sudden, deep sympathy.

"Oh, little sib." She came down the stairs to Kushud's level, and embraced her, though her physical affection was usually at arm's length, a pat to the arm or the cheek. Kushud's arms returned the clasp, by instinct and a sudden hunger for touch, but it did not soothe her. Oppong drew away. "I'm so sorry. I know what you're feeling. There's nothing for it but time and distance.

"So, we'll get out of town, maybe head north, make a tour of the little villages and hearths up the river Ench; I hear it's beautiful country up there." She put an arm back around Kushud's shoulders. "Just let me take care of everything. All right?"

Kushud said something; she didn't notice what, and it didn't matter. Oppong would take care of everything.

She drifted into the common room and sat down. Hesth was there. Hesth had probably heard everything.

"You know, I've never had much use for shifgrethor," said Hesth, after an awkward pause.

"Nor I."

"See, that's where we disagree," said Hesth, and left Kushud alone.

She sat there for a long while, turning the words over in her head. And then she went to the manager's office and paid for a second halfmonth in Room Fourteen. "Ongrabe will still be leaving after Tormenbod," she said. "Maybe even earlier. Ongrabe will let you know."

"And you're going to stay a little longer in Beberren, then? On your own?" The manager let out a satisfied noise. "I've always thought it's a good city for a young person starting out. There's room here to cast your own shadow, you know?"

"Yes," Kushud said, "exactly that," and went upstairs to her room, her own room, to add to her notes about kemmer, and halfdeads, and shifgrethor.


End file.
